Saturday, October 31, 2015

The actor Hans Teuscher has died at the age of 78 years.
He had died from cancer in Berlin on Saturday, said his agency Nicolai in
Berlin.

Teuscher, who was born in 1937 in Dresden, came from a
widely ramified family of actors. After the war he lived temporarily in the
Allgäu, where he already came to the theater as a child. After graduating from
the Higher School of Theatre Leipzig, he played as a member of inter alia, the
Berliner Volksbühne, the Deutsches Theater Berlin and the Dresden State
Theatre. He soon came to the film industry and worked in the GDR on dozens of
productions.

1988 Teuscher went to West Germany and also played there
on numerous stages. In Berlin he was seen among others at the Renaissance
Theatre and in various musical productions of the theater of the West - for example,
in "My Fair Lady" or "States as in Ancient Rome". He was widely
known in West Germany including an episode in TV series Tatort and in numerous
films in ARD and ZDF "Wer nicht schweigt, muss sterben".

Friday, October 30, 2015

He was an Oscar nominee for 'The Buddy Holly Story.' His
son is two-time Academy Award winner Gregg Rudloff, a sound man, too.

Tex Rudloff, an Oscar-nominated sound man who worked on
such 1970s classics as Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, John Carpenter’s
Halloween and Clint Eastwood’s The Outlaw Josey Wales, has died. He was 89.

Rudloff, who received his Oscar nomination for best sound
for The Buddy Holly Story (1978), starring Gary Busey, died Oct. 10, his family
announced.

Survivors include his son, Gregg Rudloff, a six-time
Academy Award nominee who received best sound Oscars for Glory (1989) and The
Matrix (1999). Like his father, he worked for Eastwood, collaborating with the
director on many of his recent films, including Flags of Our Fathers (2006), J.
Edgar (2011) and American Sniper (2014).

Tex Rudloff’s résumé also includes Sydney Pollack’s They
Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969), The Prisoner of Second Avenue (1975), The
Warriors (1979), Norman Jewison’s ... And Justice for All, Buck Henry’s First
Family (1980), Mel Brooks’ History of the World: Part I (1981) and Porky’s
Revenge (1985).

Born Walter Cecil Rudloff on Aug. 8, 1926, in Coleman,
Texas, he worked as a recordist in the machine room on the 1955 classical
musical Oklahoma! and served as president of the Cinema Audio Society and
treasurer of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences.

Thursday, October 29, 2015

Prolific and talented writer of dialogue for television
dramas and sitcoms

The Guardian

By Michael Coveney

October 29, 2015

Julia Jones, who has died aged 92, was a prominent and
versatile television writer for more than 40 years, contributing one-off dramas
to both the BBC’s Play for Today series and ITV’s Armchair Theatre, making
adaptations of Our Mutual Friend and Anne of Green Gables, and writing episodes
of The Duchess of Duke Street and sharply turned sitcoms such as Take Three
Girls and Moody and Pegg in the 1970s.

Jones, who hailed from a modest Liverpool background,
trained as an actor and toured with Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop
immediately after the second world war. She took up writing as an economic
imperative: while raising a young family, her husband, the actor Edmond “Benny”
Bennett, was afflicted with facial cancer which, in the days when the effects
of radiotherapy were more haphazard, developed into bone necrosis; he was
unable to carry on working.

Encouraged by her friend Donald Churchill, the actor and
writer, and his wife, the actor Pauline Yates, she submitted to the BBC in 1965
a short play, The Navigators, a story of a dowdy librarian falling in love with
a labourer digging the road outside her window. This led to other slots in the
BBC’s Wednesday Play series. She made her name as one of the writers of BBC’s
Take Three Girls in 1969, a well-observed and beautifully acted sitcom, one of
the BBC’s first series in colour, with three flat-sharing “swinging” 60s
archetypes – the actress left holding the baby (and the bills) by a departing
husband, an aspirant business professional, and the disorganised loser (played,
respectively, by Susan Jameson, Angela Down and Liza Goddard).

Jones found that writing dialogue came to her as easily
as breathing, and she was almost unstoppably productive. She was a small and
wiry figure, gregarious and always full of stories, and known for her steely
determination, what her family thought of as a will of iron. And, through her
family background, she was always on the left in politics, with a highly
developed sense of social injustice, supplying some of her early stories –
though she found writing prose much harder than dialogue – to the Daily Worker.

She was born in West Derby, Liverpool, and grew up in the
Everton district, one of four children of Harvey Sykes Jones, a manager for a
meat importing business, and his wife, Eva (nee Collins), who died when Julia
was 10. Harvey was of Welsh descent, and played the organ in church, while
Eva’s family were of Irish origins.

When Eva died, Harry and the children moved to Aintree
where he married again; Julia was never close to her stepmother, Rachel. She
left school to work as a wages clerk in the Dunlop rubber company and, when war
broke out, joined the women’s branch of the Auxiliary Territorial Service,
travelling all over Britain and developing a keen interest in amateur
dramatics.

She was diffident about going further in the theatre
until, about to be demobbed, she saw that the film producer Alexander Korda was
offering scholarships for ex-servicemen and women at Rada in London. She
applied, successfully, and found herself, in October 1946, in the same classes
as Michael Redgrave. She felt ill at ease, though, “just a girl from Liverpool”
as she put it, to find herself among other young women for whom the place was a
sort of finishing school.

When Littlewood, who was based in Manchester after the
war, wrote to the registrar at Rada in search of likely actors, Julia
auditioned and joined the Theatre Workshop in 1948, going on tour with them to
Czechoslovakia and Sweden and to the Edinburgh festival of 1949. Productions at
this time included Ewan MacColl’s The Other Animals, set in a concentration
camp, Johnny Noble, a working-class ballad opera about unemployment and the
Spanish civil war, and rewrites of classics by Lorca and Molière. She also
played in a version of Alice in Wonderland that visited the Theatre Royal
Stratford East in January 1950, before Littlewood acquired the place as her
permanent home.

She married Bennett, a fellow Workshop actor, on leaving
the company later in 1950, and acted in repertory theatre in Liverpool and
Canterbury. She toured, with her young family, and played the West End, with
Benny, in Alun Owen’s Progress to the Park. She also appeared on television in
Emergency Ward 10 and Z Cars. The family settled into a house in Earlsfield,
south London.

Bennett took small parts with the Royal Shakespeare
Company but his illness accelerated and so, therefore, did Julia’s writing. She
wrote for the leading TV producers of the 1970s – including Kenith Trodd and
Tony Garnett – and her Plays for Today featured great roles for Rachel Roberts,
Rosalind Ayres and Margery Mason. In the 1974 sitcom Moody and Pegg (the title
characters played by Derek Waring and Judy Cornwell), she and Churchill wrote
an entertainingly antagonistic double act for a divorced antiques dealer and an
unmarried civil servant who each thought he/she owned a valid lease on their
resentfully shared apartment.

With Churchill again, she adapted Our Mutual Friend in
1976, with a fine cast led by Leo McKern as Mr Boffin (“he was of an
overlapping, rhinoceros build, with folds in his cheeks, and his forehead, and
his eyelids, and his lips, and his ears”), John McEnery as John Rokesmith and
Jane Seymour as Bella Wilfer. The popularity of The Duchess of Duke Street,
starring Gemma Jones, followed that of Upstairs Downstairs in its story of the
cook who takes over the smart hotel as hierarchies in the class system give
way, a story that would be continued in Downton Abbey over exactly the same Edwardian
period.

West End success eluded her as a playwright, but she did
make two notable incursions, with The Garden, directed by Vivian Matalon and
starring Brian Deacon and Diana Coupland, at the Hampstead Theatre Club in
1972; and with Country Ways at the Bristol Old Vic in 1983. Bennett appeared in
the latter. He died soon afterwards, in 1986. Still Julia turned out the series
and adaptations, achieving great success with six episodes of Tom’s Midnight
Garden by Philippa Pearce in 1989 and 12 episodes of The Famous Five by Enid
Blyton in 1995, with a young, very watchable Jemima Rooper in the cast.

Julia bought a flat from Victoria Wood in Maida Vale,
north-west London, in 1990. In 2006 she married a widower whom she had met on a
cruise holiday: Derek Ballance was a retired chartered surveyor, they were both
in their 80s, and they moved to north Oxford and, eventually, a retirement
apartment in Painswick, Gloucestershire. Ballance died in February.

Jones is survived by two children from her first
marriage, Thea and Harvey, and by three grandchildren.

• Julia Marian Jones, actor and television writer, born
27 March 1923; died 9 October 2015

Wednesday, October 28, 2015

Academy Award-winning sound mixer Robert Alan (Bob)
Minkler died of respiratory failure at home in Oregon with his wife, Patty, at
his side on October 11. He was 78.

Minkler won his Oscar in 1978 for best sound on the first
film in the “Star Wars” franchise.

In a Hollywood career that spanned two decades, he worked
on such films as “Easy Rider,” “The Black Stallion,” “Bull Durham,” “Mask,”
“Urban Cowboy,” “Rocky II,” “Hair” and “Tron,” for which he was Oscar-nominated
along with his brother Lee Minkler and his nephew, three-time Oscar winner
Michael Minkler.

Born in 1937 in Glendale, Calif., to audio pioneer Lee
Darrell Minkler and Lorraine Jones Minkler, Bob spent many years as a musician
and vocalist, touring with Nat King Cole for a time. He found his way back to
the film business and began his career working alongside his brothers Donald
Minkler and Lee Minkler.

He moved to Hawaii to raise his three sons Marcus, Daniel
and Christian. Additional survivors are his grandchildren Michael, Mia, Jacob,
Matthew, Kyle and Brooke. Private services will be held in Hawaii.

Tuesday, October 27, 2015

The son of Mary Pickford's favorite director of
photography also worked on 'The Baby Maker,' 'The Onion Field' and
'Semi-Tough.'

Charles Rosher Jr., who served as the cinematographer on
the back-to-back Robert Altman films 3 Women and A Wedding, has died. He was
80.

Rosher, whose credits include the gritty The Onion Field
(1979) and Michael Ritchie’s football movie Semi-Tough (1977), died Oct. 14 of
lung cancer at his home in Beverly Hills, his daughter, Jenna, told The
Hollywood Reporter.

His father was Charles Rosher, one of the most
influential cinematographers in film history. A favorite of actress Mary Pickford
and a founding member of the American Society of Cinematographers, he received
Oscars for Sunrise (1927) — at the very first Academy Awards ceremony — and for
The Yearling (1946), and he worked on the classics Annie Get Your Gun (1950)
and Show Boat (1951).

A graduate of Beverly Hills High School, the younger
Rosher was a film loader for director Edward Dmytryk on Raintree County (1957),
starring Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor, and first assistant camera
operator on a somewhat less prestigious project, Attack of the Giant Leeches
(1959).

He served as a camera operator on the Richard Brooks
action adventure The Professionals (1966) and on such TV shows as The
Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet, Mission: Impossible and Mannix before
scoring his first director of photography credit, on Adam at Six A.M. (1970),
starring Michael Douglas in his second movie.

The great DP Conrad Hall (In Cold Blood, Butch Cassidy
and the Sundance Kid) recommended Rosher to Altman when the director was
searching for a cinematographer for 1977's 3 Women. (Hall and Rosher had
collaborated on The Professionals.)

Rosher also worked on the dramatic Carol Burnett telefilm
The Tenth Month (1979), which was directed by Joan Tewkesbury, Altman’s writer
on Nashville (1975).

In addition to A Wedding (1978), Rosher did The Baby
Maker (1970), directed by James Bridges; Pretty Maids All in a Row (1971),
written by Gene Roddenberry; Robert Benton’s The Late Show (1977); Ritchie’s
Nightwing (1979); Independence Day (1983); and Police Academy 6: City Under
Siege (1989).

Survivors also include his wife Sharlyn and grandchildren
Olivia and Juliette.

About Me

Born in Toledo, Ohio in 1946 I have a BA degree in American History from Cal St. Northridge. I've been researching the American West and western films since the early 1980s and visiting filming sites in Spain and the U.S.A. Elected a member of the Spaghetti Western Hall of Fame 2010.